How California Childhood Memories Shape My Climate Reporting Today

I recently spent a week in the Los Angeles area reporting a story about El Niño, the climate phenomenon that is reshaping the world’s weather patterns.

Driving through neighborhoods charred by fire and watching homes fall into the sea was a potent reminder that global warming is already having devastating effects on communities across the country.

It was also a powerful trip down memory lane.

I grew up in Northern California, a land where the threat of natural disaster is never far away. Mixed in with my memories of Disneyland and days on the beach are flashbacks of floods, fires and storms.

Indeed, some of my earliest memories involve catastrophes.

When I was 10, my father took me to Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. Minutes before the first pitch, a great rumble rose up from beneath the ground as the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake ruptured the San Andreas fault.

As the shaking began, we were sitting beneath the upper deck of Candlestick Park, eating fistfuls of Cracker Jack. I glanced up to see many tons of concrete and rebar trembling above my head. I looked to the outfield and saw the towering lights swaying like palm trees. Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, the “Bash Brothers” who would lead the A’s to the championship, wobbled like toy soldiers on the manicured grass.

When the shaking stopped, nearby fans turned up the radio, and early reports came in that part of the Bay Bridge had collapsed. Some fans shouted for the game to go on, but my dad knew better. As aftershocks rattled our Honda, we were among the first ones to drive out of the parking lot.

Two years after the quake, which killed 63 people and caused widespread damage across the Bay Area, I was taking a walk in nearby Piedmont when I noticed a wisp of smoke in the distance.

The Diablo winds, similar to the Santa Ana winds in Southern California, were blowing, and I was witnessing some of the first moments of the Oakland firestorm.

Over the next few days, flames killed 25 people and consumed more than 3,000 homes. Our house was spared. But on the first day of the fire, I sat in my friend’s living room and we watched on television as flames consumed the house of our classmate.

The very next year, a series of great storms walloped Northern California, setting off mudslides and flash floods. Days into the rains, I came home from school to find our basement under water, my mother frantically trying to salvage her collection of fine art books, which had been stored in cardboard boxes below the house and were now sopping wet.

A Hotter California

In the years since I was a boy, the impacts of human activity on the climate have grown significantly more intense.

Global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration levels were 353.2 parts per million in 1989. Today, those levels have jumped to 427.25 parts per million, the consequence of the relentless burning of fossil fuels.

All that carbon dioxide is trapping heat in the atmosphere, and the planet is warming up fast. Average global temperatures are now more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, and this El Niño is likely to push that even higher.

Part of my work on The Times’s Climate team is understanding the science and connecting that sometimes arcane data with real-world effects for readers, and it’s clear that these changes are hitting California hard.

Four of the five most destructive wildfires on record in the state have come in the past decade, with the fifth worst being the Oakland hills fire that I witnessed as a child. California’s annual wildfire footprint has grown nearly sixfold in the past few decades, with average acreage burned from 2020 to 2024 a full 5.7 times the pre-2000 average.

Wildfire smoke days have nearly doubled since 2017, with Californians now experiencing roughly 66 smoke days a year.

Those are some of the changes outlined in California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, a report produced by the state last month that predicts profound changes in the years ahead.

Summers will get hotter and longer, floods will become more frequent and intense, and wildfire smoke will kill thousands of people each year.

“Climate hazards are increasingly interconnected, creating cascading and compounding risks,” the report concludes. “Major climate hazards in California are most destructive when they occur sequentially or simultaneously.”

Dueling Disasters

A few weeks ago, I booked a flight from New York, where I now live, to Los Angeles. I was headed to Dana Point, a picturesque city in Orange County where houses were falling into the ocean as a the strongest El Niño on record took shape.

It was a reporting trip that would allow me to witness the growing influence of a powerful climate phenomenon, and share that story with our readers.

It would also be a bit of a homecoming, and a chance to see how the California of today had changed since my days as a boy in the Bay Area.

Then, just days before my trip, the Santa Ana winds kicked up, and a fire erupted in the hills overlooking Dana Point, destroying seven houses. When I arrived a few days later, I could still smell the smoke in the air.

I spent a morning walking through the wreckage of homes that were collapsing into the sea, and speaking to homeowners who had watched their furniture fall into the Pacific Ocean.

Then, after just a few minutes’ drive up the hill, I was standing in a neighborhood charred by flames, speaking with a homeowner who had seen his possessions go up in smoke.

El Niño was making its mark, California’s penchant for disaster was on full display, and there was no end in sight.